A sumptuous and revelatory collection of 20th-century iconography.
A set of portraits from an artist who helped to define an era of celebrity.
Photographer Edie Baskin’s distinctive hand-tinted images helped to set the aesthetically adventurous tone of the cultural juggernaut Saturday Night Live from the program’s first episode in 1975. She would go on to photograph the show’s hosts and musical guests for the next 25 years (the images would typically appear as “bumpers” between ad breaks), and her instantly recognizable shots of Steve Martin (perhaps her signature muse) or Elliott Gould or Sissy Spacek deliver memory-evoking kicks. Baskin’s images for SNL may bring Andy Warhol’s celebrity Polaroid snapshots to mind, but their effects are markedly different. While Warhol’s often harsh, cold, and flat portraits distance the viewer from the subjects, Baskin’s vibrant enhancements (she used a variety of techniques to add pigment to her black-and-white shots) reveal quirky, human qualities—the viewer leans in, their relationship with the subject deepened. The brilliant and tragic Richard Pryor, for example, pictured wearing a psychedelic pink sweater, vibrates against a stark black background, his eyes full of the pain of the world. Some of Baskin’s pieces suggest well-known paintings: The photographer grants Shelley Duvall’s elongated features the languorous elegance of a Modigliani odalisque; a delicate image of Jodie Foster with straw-colored hair and sky-blue eyes seems plucked from an Andrew Wyeth canvas. At the other end of the spectrum, Rodney Dangerfield pulses with the inhuman energy and anarchic hilarity of a Warner Bros. cartoon. The cumulative effect of the collection is one of piercing nostalgia for a vanished era of show business that now seems impossibly human-scaled. Baskin’s subjects, as ecstatically celebrated here, were not like the machine-tooled, media-trained, TikTok-ready stars of the moment; they could be lumpy, awkward, weird, unpolished, real. The miracle of Baskin’s technique was that her alterations to the objective documentary “truth” of her photographs only made the work feel more authentic, more revealing of the subjects’ essential natures—a captivating magic trick that works again and again.
A sumptuous and revelatory collection of 20th-century iconography.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781788843430
Page Count: 216
Publisher: ACC Art Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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PERSPECTIVES
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